Re: st: combining tables

[John Luke Gallup <jlgallup@pdx.edu>]

I recall Bill Gould saying at the 2010 Stata Users Group Meeting that Stata would introduce the formatting of results in the next version of Stata.  Has anyone heard any more about this project?  If it is done thoroughly and well, this may be as big a hurdle as graphics was in a previous release.

John

On Oct 31, 2012, at 4:36 AM, Roger B. Newson <r.newson@imperial.ac.uk> wrote:

> I haven't used TPL even via SAS, having weaned myself off SAS about a decade ago by writing a suite (or dialect) of Stata commands to do everything I used to do with SAS. However, this dialect now includes a language for the mass-production of tables in a Rich Text Format (RTF) document. (And linked graphs, too, in the same document.) The package to do this is -rtfutil-, which you can download from SSC, together with the -listtab- package and a suite of other packages. Users can also use these packages to produce tables in HTML, TeX and LaTeX, and probably will also to be able to use it with XML-based block-structured dialects yet to be invented.
> 
> My feedback so far is that (as Daniel says about TPL) this dialect is difficult for most people to learn in a hurry. However, a recent reference on using my packages to produce TeX and RTF documents is Newson (2012).
> 
> I hope this helps.
> 
> Best wishes
> 
> Roger
> 
> References
> 
> Newson RB. From resultssets to resultstables in Stata. The Stata Journal 2012; 12(2): 191–213. Purchase from
> http://www.stata-journal.com/article.html?article=st0254
> 
> Roger B Newson BSc MSc DPhil
> Lecturer in Medical Statistics
> Respiratory Epidemiology and Public Health Group
> National Heart and Lung Institute
> Imperial College London
> Royal Brompton Campus
> Room 33, Emmanuel Kaye Building
> 1B Manresa Road
> London SW3 6LR
> UNITED KINGDOM
> Tel: +44 (0)20 7352 8121 ext 3381
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> Email: r.newson@imperial.ac.uk
> Web page: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/nhli/r.newson/
> Departmental Web page:
> http://www1.imperial.ac.uk/medicine/about/divisions/nhli/respiration/popgenetics/reph/
> 
> Opinions expressed are those of the author, not of the institution.
> 
> On 30/10/2012 23:49, Daniel Feenberg wrote:
>> 
>> On Tue, 30 Oct 2012, Nick Cox wrote:
>> 
>>> The short answer seems to me to be that most of the activity over the
>>> last decade has come from users.
>>> 
>>> I think many Stata users would agree that we need "Better tables", but
>>> once you start to talk about details, disagreement about what that
>>> means becomes more prominent.
>> 
>> Surely the fact that SAS humbled itself to adopt the syntax and
>> semantics of the Table Production Language is a strong indication that
>> TPL is appropriate way to implement tables in a statistical package.
>> Other packages are difficult and won't create the tables that are
>> typically seen in publications. TPL can produce those tables. TPL may be
>> difficult, but that only because the SAS documentation emphasizes fancy
>> formatting issues to the near exclusion of explanatory material on the
>> basic issue of what numbers are being calculated. If Bill Gould wrote 10
>> pages of explanation, it would be easy for users to create what they
>> need. To create publication ready photo-perfect pages would take a lot
>> more explanation, of course.
>> 
>> dan feenberg
>> NBER
>> 
>>> 
>>> (I'm oddly reminded of Quine's quirky quip about the ontological
>>> problem, for which see (e.g.)
>>> 
>>> <http://sfcmadrid.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/quine-on-what-there-is.pdf>
>>> 
>>> I want to admit that I don't understand anything much after the first
>>> paragraph, but the first paragraph is what applies here.)
>> 
>> It appears to be an argument against the legitimacy of the concept of
>> zero. I think most Stata users would be hard to convince.
>> 
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